Baltimore’s Santa Crab, Pulled By Eight Tiny…Um…Other Crabs

Baltimore Magazine has an article out right now about artful Christmas decorations there by sculptor Jim Pollock – wow…:

“We as a city need more art,” Pollock says. “We need to see art on a daily basis. It’s a softening of the streets…. If people would take a chance and put art in their front yards and not worry about some critic’s criteria, we’d live in a much more interesting place. We’re taught that we have to please our boss, please our mate, but if people would go outside conformity and say, ‘I don’t care what anybody says; this is who I am,’ that’s a powerful gift to give yourself and your community.”

“There are critics,” Pollock acknowledges. …it’s not other people’s opinions that matter; it’s your own opinion that matters. It’s not critics who build cities and nations. Artists do. And we can all be artists if we want.”

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…a metallic Santa crab—with gold-painted wrenches for appendages—sitting atop a giant sleigh, which appeared to be pulled by eight smaller crabs.

(well, it is Baltimore!)

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Last year, Pollock’s own display included a bare Christmas tree frame from which dangled 10 more of his small golden crabs, two Natty Boh beer can angels, four Old Bay Seasoning boxes, and a handful of colored lights.

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…the Hubcap Christmas Tree. A crowd favorite, it’s a towering, eight-foot assemblage of battered hubcaps wired together in a pine-tree shape and decorated with flashing colored lights. It’s topped off with a yellow, plastic stegosaurus where you’d expect a golden star.

“The second year I had the Hubcap Tree up, these people came and said, ‘We come every year to have our picture taken in front of the Hubcap Tree,'” Pollock recalls. “I said, ‘But it’s only been up two years.’ That shows how hungry people are for traditions, especially secular, non-denominational traditions. It’s hard to unite a country that’s multi-cultural, but if we celebrated each other’s traditions instead of fighting over them, we’d be partying all the time.”